Confusing Politics With Religion

Ross Douthat has been heroically measured in his assessment of the GOP’s populists, pointing out that they may be morons on tactics, but they often have better policy ideas than the Republican regulars. Now that the idiotic, entirely avoidable crisis is over, he says that Lessons Had Better Be Learned if the GOP is going to save itself from itself. Excerpt:

However you slice and dice the history, the strategery, and the underlying issues, the decision to live with a government shutdown for an extended period of time — inflicting modest-but-real harm on the economy, needlessly disrupting the lives and paychecks of many thousands of hardworking people, and further tarnishing the Republican Party’s already not-exactly-shiny image — in pursuit of obviously, obviously unattainable goals was not a normal political blunder by a normally-functioning political party. It was an irresponsible, dysfunctional and deeply pointless act, carried out by a party that on the evidence of the last few weeks shouldn’t be trusted with the management of a banana stand, let alone the House of Representatives.

This means that the still-ongoing intra-conservative debate over the shutdown’s wisdom is not, I’m sorry, the kind of case where reasonable people can differ on the merits and have good-faith arguments and ultimately agree to disagree.There was no argument for the shutdown itself that a person unblindered by political fantasies should be obliged to respect, no plausible alternative world in which it could have led to any outcome besides self-inflicted political damage followed by legislative defeat, and no epitaph that should be written for its instigators’ planning and execution except: “These guys deserved to lose.”

Yeah you right. I’m always fascinated by the question of how we know what we know, and was thinking this morning about what kind of mind sees what just happened as either a victory, or a defeat that happened not because the cause was hopeless, but because the cause was betrayed, its noble defenders stabbed in the back by faithless RINO traitors. Because that is the emerging narrative within the right-wing bubble.

Can the Tea Partiers’ beliefs be falsified? I don’t think they can be. I mean, is there any evidence that could convince them that the fault here lies with themselves, in the way they conceive politics, and in the way they behaved? It sure doesn’t look like it. In that sense, they think of politics as a kind of religion. It’s not for nothing that the hardcore House members stood together and sang “Amazing Grace” as the impossibility of their position became ever clearer. They really do bring a religious zealotry to politics.

Let me hasten to say that I’m not endorsing the “Christianist” meme, which I find far too reductive, among other things. Besides, many of the Tea Partiers and fellow travelers are not motivated by religious faith, but by a religious-like zeal for their political ideology. It was like this on the Right before the advent of the Tea Party. There has long been a sense on the Right that the movement must be vigilant against the backsliders and compromisers, who will Betray True Conservatism if you give them the chance. Again, the religious mindset: politics as a purity test. In this worldview, a politician who compromises sells out the True Faith — and faith, by definition, does not depend on empirical observation to justify itself.

I have had conversations in recent years with fellow conservatives who simply could not bring themselves to face the failures of George W. Bush — failures that were also the fault of all those who supported him (I voted for him twice). Similarly, I have had conversations with liberal friends who cannot see any fault in Barack Obama. When I point out that he has done the same things that caused them to condemn Bush, they just blink and say some version of, “Well, he must have his reasons, and besides, have you seen how crazy the Republicans are?” So the “politics as religion” thing is not confined to the Right.

But it does dominate the Right today in a way that it does not affect the Left. As Douthat points out, if the Republicans fail to confront this epistemic problem in their own ranks, the disaster that the party’s hardline led it into will be repeated. A good way to start is to return to the principle that conservatism entails a rejection of ideology. Here’s Russell Kirk, on the “errors of ideology.”:

Kenneth Minogue, in his recent book Alien Powers: the Pure Theory of Ideology,uses the word “to denote any doctrine which presents the hidden and saving
truth about the world in the form of social analysis. It is a feature of all such doctrines to incorporate a general theory of the mistakes of everybody else.”

That “hidden and saving truth” is a fraud—a complex of contrived falsifying
“myths”, disguised as history, about the society we have inherited.

Religion requires us to believe the impossible; that’s what makes it religion. Politics is the art of the possible; that’s why it is not religion.

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78 Responses to Confusing Politics With Religion

Like the old joke goes – voting for GOP is shooting yourself in the foot. Voting for Dem’s is shooting yourself in the head. One isn’t a solution for the other.

Or sometimes you just have to remind yourself you do have a spine.

Or that SNL skit where Gore says I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy. GOP just can’t fundamentally come to terms with an America that re-elected the deeply statist Obama. And no, it has nothing to do with racism. It has everything to do with “government is the only thing we all belong to”, the creepy cult of personality and all the credentialism gussied up as better-than-you meritocracy.

Let’s not confuse what’s going on within the GOP with faith or belief, please.

In Freudian terms the GOP is now entirely id: instinctive, impulsive, irresponsible, seeking to satiate its wants without regard to reality or societal norms, and unable to differentiate between its wants and its needs.

So shutting down the government didn’t have to make sense because it wasn’t about being sensible…it was about satiating a desire rather than executing a plan.

The id is faithless, not faithful.

Pointing this out because the more we look for higher explanations the more we’re looking in the wrong direction…

@CK, accepting the reality of events that we personally didn’t witness does requires a certain degree of faith. But not all leaps of faith are of the same magnitude.

For example in my lifetime some nations have written and adopted constitutions. So the probability that the Constitutional Convention happened in 1789 seems high. But I’ve never seen anyone come back from the dead after three days, so we’re talking about an entirely different leap of faith.

At this point a philosopher might try to tie me in knots by pointing out that every worldview other than solipsism requires a leap of faith. Or that I really can’t prove I’m not a “brain in the jar” or created last Thursday with a memory. But I really have better things to do with my time than debate those points.

Whoa, Rod, now you’ve used the phrase “stab in the back.” That was the preferred language of Erich von Ludendorff, the German general who fecklessly abandoned his leadership of the Imperial German government at the end of WWI and let the civilian government take the fall for Germany’s surrender. Ludendorff’s contention that Germany could have won the war if not for a weak left-wing civilian government got Germany’s version of the “lost cause” movement rolling in the interwar period, and that didn’t end well. And yes, I realize that I have now invoked Godwin’s Law, but that particular turn of phrase is just so very historically freighted.

icarusr writes, “I think the most important reason you see more of the “Politics as Religion” frame of mind among self-described conservatives than among liberals is not so much christianism, but the fact that religious people start off ahead of sceptics and agnostics on the faith front.” There’s something right here, but I don’t think that this is going to quite work as an explanation of the phenomena here as written, because — as I intend to keep shouting on every discussion thread on this blog if necessary! 🙂 — Democrats are still a majority Christian party, by a large margin (and a theist party by an even larger one, once you put in Jews and other members of religious minorities).

Rather, what I think makes a difference here is that liberals are on the whole used to _including_ those from very different faiths than their own in their political discussions and alliances , and very much including atheists and agnostics. So they are used to needing to come to agreements that are, at best, a cobbling-together of second- and third-best preferences from sometimes significantly disparate sets of underlying ethical commitments.

In cartoon form, liberals are very used to the following sort of exchange: “I believe P, and you believe not-P. Um, ok… what about Q? We both believe Q? Ok, great. What about R, then? Both on the same page there? Alright, is that a sufficient overlap for us to work towards policy Z?”

Whereas, again very much in cartoon form, conservatives today seem more used to the following sort of exchange: “I believe P, and you believe not-P? GET OUT OF HERE YOU DAD-GUMMED RINO!”

I think there’s another element to explaining this particular left/right asymmetry, which is that it has become part of the epistemic culture on the left (but _not_ the far-left so much, interestingly) to have a very strong deference to science and scientific approaches to questions. There’s more of a tendency, by contrast, on the right to try to refer questions to first principles. E.g., it seems a perennial and ubiquitous matter in intra-right discussions to ask what is the _real_ conservative policy, and then aim to adopt that. There is just not nearly so much of that among liberals in policy debates.

“Austrian Economic Theory holds that the central truths of economics are a priori truths and that therefore inference from these a priori truths are ‘apodictically certain’; in the same way that inferences in a geometrical system are certain. Mises and Hayek were Austrian economists and have played a huge role in modern conservative approaches.”

Let me stop you there. What you speak of are the Misesan and Rothbardian approches, but not the Hayekian approach. Hayek’s approach did lead to the work of Vernon Smith whereby his Nobel laureate work in experimental economics relied heavily on empirical data to strengthen Hayek’s hypothesis about knowledge and markets.

As for Mises, yes his approach to a “general theory” of economics is in heavy contrast to the pure empiricists of Friedman, etc. That does not mean that Mises et al thought that history should be ignored, see Mises Human Action and Theory and History.

Finally, it’s quite ridiculous to claim that Conservative-GOP Inc has been influenced by the Austrian perspective since these folks have disdained an Austrian approach to things as much as it disdained Ron Paul. These are the same folks who booed Ron Paul when he faced off with Rudy Giuliani when Ron Paul tried to give them a history lesson about US involvment in Iran and the Middle East. As such, the GOP’s most explicit Austrian was constantly marginalized by GOP-Conservative Inc for his lessons in history.

“Could it similarly be said that I did not see the Consitutional convention in 1789, and I trust the testimony of its various witnesses. But I cannot prove to anyone, or to myself, that the several states ratified the document?”

To Pete S: “But doesn’t this viewpoint make accepting any historical event an act of faith? None of us saw Columbus sail to the new world, but most of us believe that he did. At this point it would be just as hard to disprove that as to disprove any of the Biblical record of Jesus’ life.”

If the Biblical record should be accepted as empirical evidence simply because it was written down long ago, why do you (I’m guessing) not also accept the Vedas, the Quran, and other religious texts as empirical evidence? To accept one but not others must rely on something more than empirical proof.

MH’s point about leaps of faith being bigger when you’re talking about accounts of miracles is important, too. It makes sense that faith and religion are synonyms.

“But it does dominate the Right today in a way that it does not affect the Left.”

I agree, though I’ve definitely met some absolutely nutty people on the Left at the grassroots level, at least as bad as the craziest Tea Partier. Thing is, the adults in the Democratic Party marginalized them during the last few decades. On the Right on the other hand, the ideological Crusaders are waxing far stronger than they ever were on the Left and definitely have at least one hand on the wheel of the GOP, if not both.

You ask me, I don’t see the Republicans making many electoral gains in the near future. Their reaction against the Obama Presidency has been so hostile and over the top that I think they’ve ended up doing far more damage to themselves than they did to him. Sure, they definitely denied Obama the chance to do a lot of the things he wanted to do, but they’ve done far more damage to themselves in the process, as much or more I think than they managed to do to themselves even during the Bush years. It doesn’t show as much, largely because of redistricting, but in the end I think they’ve essentially handed the Democrats an electoral college lock and a long-term Senate majority that wasn’t guaranteed to last at the beginning of Obama’s presidency.

This “politics is the art of the possible” cliche is getting at an important truth, but I don’t think it’s a truth that’s being applied consistently. That is, I think that people make very subjective judgments about where the system has its hard points and its soft points, often for reasons that reflect a pre-existing preference for certain policy outcomes, and then adjust back their expectations for “the possible” to turn ideological preferences into ostensibly pragmatic ones.

For example, I don’t think that there’s anything particularly post-ideological about the way that the ACA has been placed on a sort of unapproachable pedestal, protected from the sort of normal fiscal revisions and emendations that the rest of the government routinely faces. If someone asks why it’s “insane” that the Republicans would expect any kind of concessions over Obamacare, the answer is usually something like “it’s a cornerstone of the Obama agenda”, or even more literally “it’s something Obama cares deeply about”. In effect, Obama’s preferences get written into the system as a “hard point” around which the rest of the system needs to pivot as a fulcrum. That’s a pretty impressive accomplishment on his part!

But opposition to the ACA is never treated as a hard point in the same way, despite the fact that the extent to which Ted Cruz “cares” about stopping the program doesn’t seem any less intensely promoted. So his opposition is ideological, while Obama’s support is, I guess, somehow post-ideological, despite the otherwise apparent symmetry of their refusal to negotiate over relatively inflexible positions.

Before I see any discussion of this being a unique problem of “the Right”, I’d need to see some kind of coherent narrative about how the Bush administration could have pushed through Congress a Social Security reform initiative over the opposition of the Democratic congress, which seems like the most natural counterpart on the Left. Would the Left have actually shut down the government? Probably not, in the sense that the mere threat of them doing things far short of shutting down the government was sufficient to dissuade Bush from putting a hand anywhere near the electrified third-rail. But in a world where public opinion was structured differently, and the Left was more isolated from the center on this particular issue, it’s pretty easy for me to imagine them resorting to straight-ahead obstructionism as a matter of necessity.

And quite apart from the machinery of governmental law-making, I doing see the kind of abstract arguments that surround the question of what ought to be done about Social Security, or Medicare, or SNAP, or dozens of other programs, as convincing me that the Left is any less quasi-religious in its stances than the Right. If you oppose these things, you are a bad person, full stop, and deserve to be called racist and greedy and so forth. I think the Left actually has firmer ground in making these accusations than the Right has, in calling Obama’s supporters “socialists”. But if this is some kind of meta-debate about whether it’s bad to have fixed views that don’t allow compromise, then the quality of reasons that explain the immutability of views don’t break the symmetry.

No one today ever wants to compromise on matters of core conviction. It’s just that the Democrats have done a better job of explaining why they shouldn’t need to. That’s a different sort of critique than the one Rod is trying to make, and one less flattering to centrist pundits who want to write off the Tea Party as a bunch of nutjobs who aren’t like the rest of us honest folk.

I think it’s worse than a non-falsifiable belief system. It’s an ever-increasing cycle of looniness. After Romney lost (badly), a lot of (what passes for) right-wingers were basically saying, “It’s because we weren’t batsh*t raving foaming-at-the-mouth enough. If only we were more batsh*t raving foaming-at-the-mouth, we would have won. We’ll do it next time, and by G-D we’ll win, because the Real America is just waiting for someone who’s sufficiently batsh*t raving foaming-at-the-mouth.”
OK, so this year I think it’s safe to say that the House Republicans have been more batsh*t raving foaming-at-the-mouth than they were during the Romney campaign. And guess what? It didn’t work, again. And what is the right wing echo chamber response? Needless to say, it’s along the lines of, well, next time we’ll just be even more batsh*t raving foaming-at-the-mouth, and the Real America will finally see the light, and we’ll win. (Of course those of us outside the echo chamber understand that this Real America is no longer anywhere near a majority, if it ever was…)
Through how many iterations can this go? Is there, as mathematicians say, an upper bound? Until we reach one, American politics and governance will just be an endless cycle of this once-tragedy-now-farce.

I think the number one mistake the GOP has made in the Obama era is never settling on a narrative regarding why Obama should be opposed. One day he’s the “affirmative action” President, over his head and unable to speak without a teleprompter. The next day he’s a nasty, Machiavillian political operator that would make Nixon blush.

They don’t dare give their real reason. They hate President Obama because,

1) He won an election, and then won another.

2) He displace Hillary Clinton as the nominee, whom the Republicans were salivating at running against.

(I, on the other hand, voted for Obama in part because he was NOT Hillary, although he had some pretty good ideas of his own.)

Every since 1980, the Republicans have suffered from a sense of wounded entitlement every time a Democrat wins anything significant. They have this view that its their turn, and they are entitled to a century or so of dominance, and gosh darn if those voters don’t turn around and vote Democrat now and then.

But they can’t cop to that, it sounds so… petty. They have to make up something that rationalizes their irrational outrage, and they can never agree, or remain consistent, on what the fig leaf shall be.

I think people are conflating belief and faith on the one hand, with acceptance of facts on the other. I don’t “believe” that Columbus sailed in 1492, and I dont “believe” in evolution. I accept them as historical and scientific facts. I could change my mind with new empirical evidence, but belief does not factor in. This is the inherent contradiction in literal interpretations of religious texts. If you accept all the events in the Bible as literal historical facts, you take Christianity out of the realm of faith and into that of sterile history. In the process, Christianity is politicized and trivialized.

AEY, if you ever discuss epistemology with a philosopher they’ll tie you into knots on this topic. First you’ve made an assumption that external reality exists, and that your senses are an accurate representation of that reality. Second, you’ve assumed that this external reality doesn’t have rules that vary moment to moment, so you can extrapolate backwards and forwards in time.

Now I happen to agree with you about these assumption, but to keep the philosophers at bay I admit that they are assumptions.

“For example, I don’t think that there’s anything particularly post-ideological about the way that the ACA has been placed on a sort of unapproachable pedestal, protected from the sort of normal fiscal revisions and emendations that the rest of the government routinely faces.” But this is simply false! No one — really no one — has said that the details of Obamacare are beyond negotiation. And certainly they were all of it, from the roots to the leaves , up for negotiation when the law was being passed in the first place. But if you want changes to it, and they aren’t changes that the other party wants, _you have to offer them something they want more than they don’t want those changes._ That’s how negotiation works. And the GOP refused to offer the Dems anything at all that the Dems wanted at all. So, unsurprisingly, they weren’t interested in a deal where they give up some things that they have in exchange for nothing that they want.

First you’ve made an assumption that external reality exists, and that your senses are an accurate representation of that reality. Second, you’ve assumed that this external reality doesn’t have rules that vary moment to moment, so you can extrapolate backwards and forwards in time.

MH, insofar as these assumptions can be tested, they hold up rather well, and serve as a reliable guide to daily life and human comfort and safety. E.g., in a defensive driving course, it is often emphasized that the laws of physics are inexorable and don’t know you personally.

Philosophers are capable of speculating about any number of things that might be true. That doesn’t provide one iota of evidence that the common assumptions derived from daily experience are false.

Science never proves anything true. It provides 99.999999999 percent probability that insofar as an assumption has been tested, evidence and results have not disproved it.

Some critical points of the resurrection have a handful of witnesses, but it is beyond the scope of recurrent testing and verification. Further, the witnesses don’t KNOW for a fact that the man taken down from the cross was entirely dead. He MIGHT have woken up in the tomb and gone walking around showing off his wounds. That’s why in matters of religion, we walk by faith and not by sight.

@MH: I actually agree with the philosophers on that point. We make unconscious assumptions (informed by culture) that precede and shape our perceptions of reality. My point is that the nature of those assumptions is completely different when it comes to math/science/history, as opposed to art/literature/theology. A person can believe in hope, mercy, justice, love, democracy, and God. But those beliefs are not reducible to empirical evidence. They are based on experience, logic, and, perhaps, revelation. I often hear people using scientific language and reasoning when addressing the humanities, and I just feel like they are making a basic mistake of genre.

Ok, I guess I do need to put on my actual philosopher hat and wade in here for a minute. We ought distinguish here between propositions that start off as assumptions but are nonetheless, once you take them as a starting point, amenable to further revision and even rejection in the face of further evidence, in particular, evidence of a broadly empirical and intersubjective sort; and propositions that are not amenable to such revision and/or rejection. The belief that the external world works basically like our senses tell us is in the former class, and we revise it in greater and lesser ways in accord with further experience (e.g., learning that heliocentrism is true, not geocentrism). And we could even come rationally to reject that assumption in the face of appropriate evidence (such as experienced by the Zionites (what is the right term here??) in _The Matrix_). But belief in, say, the trinity is of the latter sort. No empirical experience could be brought to bear to revise or reject belief in that proposition. _Maybe_ evidence in the form of testimony from trusted sources — e.g., if you were a devout Catholic and then the Pope and all the cardinals told you that there was in fact no trinity — _maybe_ that would be the sort of thing that would lead to a rational revision in that belief. But by and large it stands outside such rational challenge.

By the same token, beliefs in propositions in the former category tend to be well-integrated with our overall theories of the world, whereas those in the latter category do not share the same tendency. (How could they? What cannot in principle be falsified by a source of evidence cannot in principle be confirmed by that source, either.) Which is why, e.g., you see lots and lots of intersubjective disagreement on questions like the trinity, and comparatively very little such disagreement on questions like, does the external world exist and do our senses basically tell us the truth about it.

Similarly, I have had conversations with liberal friends who cannot see any fault in Barack Obama. When I point out that he has done the same things that caused them to condemn Bush, they just blink and say some version of, “Well, he must have his reasons, and besides, have you seen how crazy the Republicans are?”

I think its time to get back to basic, of the original post. We could debate philosophers until the sun runs out of hydrogen and never resolve anything.

I voted for Obama, twice. I expected to be disappointed, and I was. First disappointment:

The entire Democratic establishment started out 2008 lined up behind Hillary Clinton. She made a good run of it, but after John Edwards dropped out, Barack Obama was the one who showed that Hillary was not the consensus candidate and annointed successor. I expected him to really shake up the Democratic Party, but he didn’t, he sank into the establishment as it was. He made the same mistake after winning election that George McGovern made after winning the nomination.

Second disappointment: Putting Summers and Geithner in charge of financial policy, when he could have swung an openly populist policy. Sure, some failing banks WERE too big to fail, yes, if he just stepped back and let them fall, Herbert Hoover style, we would have been dealing with 30 percent unemployment, etc. BUT, once we bail such a business out, it becomes a ward of the state for its incompetence. Break it up into pieces small enough that they can be allowed to fly or crash without taking the economy down with them, sell the pieces off to reimburse taxpayers, and move on.

There wouldn’t have been much of a mass base for the Tea Party.

Third, he let some important priorities like mass transit get bogged down in a recovery and reinvestment bill. That could have been a good place for some funding, but if you mean to do something big, don’t do it piece meal, and don’t let it rest on whether Scott Walker wants it or whether Arnold Scharzeneggar wants it. Got it at like Ike went at the Interstate highways.

Fourth, he should have had only one thing to say about same sex marriage: the constitution gives the President of the United States no jurisdiction over marriage. Its a matter for the states. Why should we turn the White House into a bully pulpit for every issue under the sun? The responsibilities the constitution DOES entrust to the president are quite enough to keep the president busy.

As to war policy, I understand that one can’t turn on a dime after eight years of military commitment. Getting out of Iraq was messy, but handled about as well as it could have been. Of course the government of Iraq, such as it is, had already refused an extension of American military presence to President Bush, which simplified matters. Afghanistan… what a quagmire. We pull out now, we leave people who believed in us, build their businesses, sent their daughter to school, at the mercy of some nasty barbarians. I’m not going to quibble. He is drawing our forces down.

I am becoming desperate for some offerings on the Republican side that I could vote for, that could really wake the Democrats up from their smug navel contemplating lethargy. But I still vote for Democrats, because its true, even Rod Dreher has seen how crazy the Republicans are.

It’s not just that the GOP offered the Dems nothing that the Dems wanted. Rather, they offered nothing. Instead, they’re simply refusing to do their jobs. If a clear CR had been put to a vote in the House at any time during the stand-off, it would have passed.

Under the Hastert Rule, the House leadership should refuse to put any bill to a vote unless it has at least 217 GOP votes (out of 232 GOP House members). Thus, the Hastert Rule allows a mere 16 GOP representatives (i.e., 7% of the GOP caucus and 3-4% of the House) to tank a bill. In this sense, the Hastert Rule is far more pernicious than the cloture rule in the Senate, which requires more than 40% of Senators to stop the Senate’s business. Under the Hastert Rule, a mere 3-4% of representatives can disrupt the House’s business. There is simply no way that the Constitution ever envisioned such an undemocratic tool as the Hastert Rule.

Despite what some commenters have said, I do think there’s a religious connection here.

Yesterday, the Kansas Supreme Court announced the indefinite suspension of former AG and anti-abortion zealot Phill Kline’s law license.

No reasonable attorney could read through the long list of Kline’s violations and conclude that he had a functioning ethical compass. In many instances, his violations weren’t even close calls. And throughout the process, Kline refused to admit that he had engaged in unethical conduct, apparently believing that his ethical lapses were justified by the fact that he was pursuing the allegedly noble cause of prosecuting abortion providers.

Throughout this process, evangelicals have supported Kline, believing that he was railroaded. In fact, the ABA-accredited law school at Liberty University even offered Kline a cushy teaching position, despite the fact that there could be no doubt about the ultimate outcome of Kline’s case. (The evidence against him was overwhelming, and he proffered no substantive defense save conspiracy theories.)

So, I was curious how evangelical news outlets would treat Kline’s indefinite suspension. In particular, I wondered whether any prominent evangelical voices would make a realistic assessment of Kline’s case and conclude that the ends (anti-abortion activism) cannot justify the means (unethical, if not illegal, conduct). Sadly, such voices, if there are any, are holding their peace. Instead, the evangelical world seems to hold fast to the notion that Kline has been railroaded by dark forces under the control of Barack Obama and Kathleen Sebelius.

Liberals certainly have policy preferences. But, in the main, they don’t believe that their views are entitled to prevail and therefore work bit-by-bit to move in the general direction of what they believe is best, working within existing political realities.

Many conservatives, in contrast, believe that their views are right and that all opposing views are evil, and that any political reality that doesn’t give them instant gratification is also evil. And, according to this meme, rules are simply in place to hide the corruption and protect evil-doers. Therefore, there’s a tendency for conservatives to ignore political realities and focus their efforts on serving as prophets who expose the alleged evil.

Phill Kline is a hero to evangelicals because he exposed evil, never mind that he broke a litany of ethical rules in doing so. To evangelicals, abortion is evil. Therefore, anything that stands in the way of prosecuting abortion providers (e.g., ethical rules) are inherently corrupt and don’t need to be followed. The same logic plays out in the evangelical wing of the House. The ACA is evil, therefore it’s ok to refuse to do our jobs and risk tanking the world economy to stop it and unveil its evil.

When I look at this conduct, I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’s statement that he would much rather be rules by a robber-baron than an inquisitor. After all, at times, the robber-baron’s conscience will get the better of him, and he’ll relent. In contrast, the inquisitor views the picks of his conscience as temptations, and therefore cannot relent.

However, noble their motives may have been and are, within their beliefs is this inherent problem. If you see that everything you believe is “perfect” and mandated by God, then the idea of compromising those beliefs is blasphemy and sacrilege. How indeed can you live in a pluralistic society, when those who reject your beliefs, are by your definition “evil” and “sinful”?